IwouldprefernotTo
First Post
Hello everyone, long time reader first time poster here. This may be a bit long but I tried to provide all the necessary context so that peoplemay understan my situation better. If there's anything unclear it may be my fault as english is not my first language.
Okay so here's the thing, we recently started a campaing at level 5. I chose Hexblade because that's a class I've been wanting to try for a while now and this was the perfect opportunity as the DM also gave us 2 npc's each that serve as my character's siblings (which I also really wanted to use and develop).
In total, our MC's are my hexblade, a ranger, a rogue and a monk (played by the DM). The npc's are respectively a champion fighter and a bard (mine), an oath of redemption paladin and monk (ranger), a domain of death cleric and barbarian (rogue) and a monk and druid (DM). At first glance the party doesn't seem too unbalanced but we soon realized during our first couple of combats that we can deal a bunch of damage to single targets but have basically no AoE, which is a problem because all the npc's will remain lower level than us to ensure we keep the spotlight so the chances of AoE improving are slim.
Now as you may have guessed, because each of us controls so many characters during combat, coming up with strategies is a bit hard (still fun tho so I don't complain) given how many features and spells we have to keep track of.
In my case, I can just spam sword attacks with both my champion and hexblade both of whom also get advantage when I cast Darkness but the bard is pretty useless due to bad stat rolls and limited spells. I can live with this...except that our enemies do strategize effectively (our DM is pretty good at that) which quickly posses a considerable risk for both front and backliners.
And while normally I'd be fine with just using the mighty EB+AB combo along with Darkness, the homebrew world which we made turned out to be pretty heavily against magic (we rolled on a bunch of tables to decide the different kingdoms and luck was not on our side lol) and the few kingdoms that do allow magic usually only allow divine magic such as from clerics, divine sorcerers or aasimars (and then the religious classes have to maintain a low profile because some kingdoms are extreme fundamentalists). So this means my hexblade (and my bard to an extent) have to refrain from using iconic spells like eldritch blast or armor of agathys too often as that could get our party in trouble in the long run.
This is fine by me as I knew going in that the world at large didn't like spellcasters and I also enjoy the challenge, but I didn't realize how…unbalanced? Our party would be until we got into actual combat. We all tried to pick classes that both interested us and could potentially help but between the rolls not being on our side, our characters all having trust issues to resolve and the trouble strategizing, it's made me realize that there are a bunch of situations in which I could've helped with my warlock had she access to non demonic magic (again mostly because of the laws of the world).
So while I could just multiclass into other magical classes, I find myself wondering how to balance the multiclassing.
My DM told me that it could be very useful, especially because in the future our party may have to leave half our team at camp to avoid trouble due to cultural clashes and also this last session the ranger leveled up and the scene implied he gained knowledge throguh ancestral spiritual energy that he otherwise couldn't have obtained. That's very important to me since I don't like multiclassing uness it makes sense for the character (hence why I haven't even considered paladin) and being a bard in this world would usually require my charater to study in one of the few official magical schools (I could do this but I don't wanna drag down the adventuring time for the rest of the party) or gain that knowledge via these spiritual awakening.
So I ask for help now because chances are next week my character will also level up (there was an interaction I had to do but couldn't due to my hexblade being too traumatized to speak for a few days) and while I love the next feats of the subclass, the accursed specter could give more troubles than benefits given the kind of world we have and also because our cleric would probably be very against me binding souls to my will and I need her healing.
I've been toying with the idea of multiclassing to shadow or divine sorcerer for lore reasons since my character is an aasimar who lost her way after befriending an entity trapped in a sword. The idea here would be that she finally can access her own magic without her patron as middleman and that magic could be still divine or corrupted already by the patron. Both would give me access to SP which is a great resource to have and each subclass also offers some good unique stuff like extra healing for divine sorc or eyes of darkness for shadow sorc (which could save me 1 eldritch invocation in devil's sight). Converesely given the context of the level up, I could go for lore or whispers bard and get some more bardic inspiration for the rest of the party.
A friend suggested I dip a few levels into both bard and sorc to get the spell slots, sorerer points, and the bard goodies like JoaT and expertise as well as maintain all my ASIs but that would delay my warlock levels quite a bit. And while I don't mind, I just wonder if it's as good an idea in practice as it seems in theory (the DM said he expects us to reach level 14 at least and 20 at best before the end of the campaing).
So...I'm a bit stumped. There's a lot of really good combos and while I understand that multiclassing could mean my character wouldn't be as strong in the long run, I really want her to be more versatile in and out of combat for those moments our party wil split (because the DM warned us it will happen) and to better funcion in the homebrew world.
So I'd really appreciate some insight.
Okay so here's the thing, we recently started a campaing at level 5. I chose Hexblade because that's a class I've been wanting to try for a while now and this was the perfect opportunity as the DM also gave us 2 npc's each that serve as my character's siblings (which I also really wanted to use and develop).
In total, our MC's are my hexblade, a ranger, a rogue and a monk (played by the DM). The npc's are respectively a champion fighter and a bard (mine), an oath of redemption paladin and monk (ranger), a domain of death cleric and barbarian (rogue) and a monk and druid (DM). At first glance the party doesn't seem too unbalanced but we soon realized during our first couple of combats that we can deal a bunch of damage to single targets but have basically no AoE, which is a problem because all the npc's will remain lower level than us to ensure we keep the spotlight so the chances of AoE improving are slim.
Now as you may have guessed, because each of us controls so many characters during combat, coming up with strategies is a bit hard (still fun tho so I don't complain) given how many features and spells we have to keep track of.
In my case, I can just spam sword attacks with both my champion and hexblade both of whom also get advantage when I cast Darkness but the bard is pretty useless due to bad stat rolls and limited spells. I can live with this...except that our enemies do strategize effectively (our DM is pretty good at that) which quickly posses a considerable risk for both front and backliners.
And while normally I'd be fine with just using the mighty EB+AB combo along with Darkness, the homebrew world which we made turned out to be pretty heavily against magic (we rolled on a bunch of tables to decide the different kingdoms and luck was not on our side lol) and the few kingdoms that do allow magic usually only allow divine magic such as from clerics, divine sorcerers or aasimars (and then the religious classes have to maintain a low profile because some kingdoms are extreme fundamentalists). So this means my hexblade (and my bard to an extent) have to refrain from using iconic spells like eldritch blast or armor of agathys too often as that could get our party in trouble in the long run.
This is fine by me as I knew going in that the world at large didn't like spellcasters and I also enjoy the challenge, but I didn't realize how…unbalanced? Our party would be until we got into actual combat. We all tried to pick classes that both interested us and could potentially help but between the rolls not being on our side, our characters all having trust issues to resolve and the trouble strategizing, it's made me realize that there are a bunch of situations in which I could've helped with my warlock had she access to non demonic magic (again mostly because of the laws of the world).
So while I could just multiclass into other magical classes, I find myself wondering how to balance the multiclassing.
My DM told me that it could be very useful, especially because in the future our party may have to leave half our team at camp to avoid trouble due to cultural clashes and also this last session the ranger leveled up and the scene implied he gained knowledge throguh ancestral spiritual energy that he otherwise couldn't have obtained. That's very important to me since I don't like multiclassing uness it makes sense for the character (hence why I haven't even considered paladin) and being a bard in this world would usually require my charater to study in one of the few official magical schools (I could do this but I don't wanna drag down the adventuring time for the rest of the party) or gain that knowledge via these spiritual awakening.
So I ask for help now because chances are next week my character will also level up (there was an interaction I had to do but couldn't due to my hexblade being too traumatized to speak for a few days) and while I love the next feats of the subclass, the accursed specter could give more troubles than benefits given the kind of world we have and also because our cleric would probably be very against me binding souls to my will and I need her healing.
I've been toying with the idea of multiclassing to shadow or divine sorcerer for lore reasons since my character is an aasimar who lost her way after befriending an entity trapped in a sword. The idea here would be that she finally can access her own magic without her patron as middleman and that magic could be still divine or corrupted already by the patron. Both would give me access to SP which is a great resource to have and each subclass also offers some good unique stuff like extra healing for divine sorc or eyes of darkness for shadow sorc (which could save me 1 eldritch invocation in devil's sight). Converesely given the context of the level up, I could go for lore or whispers bard and get some more bardic inspiration for the rest of the party.
A friend suggested I dip a few levels into both bard and sorc to get the spell slots, sorerer points, and the bard goodies like JoaT and expertise as well as maintain all my ASIs but that would delay my warlock levels quite a bit. And while I don't mind, I just wonder if it's as good an idea in practice as it seems in theory (the DM said he expects us to reach level 14 at least and 20 at best before the end of the campaing).
So...I'm a bit stumped. There's a lot of really good combos and while I understand that multiclassing could mean my character wouldn't be as strong in the long run, I really want her to be more versatile in and out of combat for those moments our party wil split (because the DM warned us it will happen) and to better funcion in the homebrew world.
So I'd really appreciate some insight.
